Education, Education, Education!

With the ‘screed scientist’ at the helm of our business, it is little wonder that education has always figured high on CSC’s agenda. Be it educating the industry through our ‘screed scientist’ initiative or honing the skills of our work force through constant training, CSC’s always kept itself active on the education front. And it’s no less than a matter of pride to us that CSC carried out the screeding for 35 schools across the UK in the past year, with 14 schools in Greater London alone.

Our ‘school bag’ came with an assorted medley of projects last year, with projects ranging from plain old school floors with traditional screed to sports halls and eco-builds with modified/fast drying screed over insulation and underfloor heating. Though the screeding work in itself was relatively less tedious than some of the highly challenging screeding projects we carried out last year for the Olympic Park, Sushi Samba and the like – the school projects did put our skills to test in terms of planning and attention to little details. And, we have to say our brilliant teams came out of the exam halls carrying some well-deserved As!

For some of the schools, our teams had to work their way through quirky access routes and unpleasant weather to get the floors screeded and ready on time for tiny tots heading for their first day at school. But, good planning and the right screed protection helped us score full marks for these rather tricky challenges!

For some of the other schools, the challenge lay in carrying out our work during regular school hours with little busy bodies bustling around. But thanks to the sound Health and Safety system we have in place, we could carry out our work smoothly while keeping the site safe for all the inquisitive little Handy Mannys and Bob the Builders who were keen to lend a hand in fixing the floors. And we are really pleased that our clients Lend Lease chose to adopt our site safety precautions at Waverley School as an example for their future projects.

Another interesting project that we are happy to have been part of was – The Canvey Island Skills Campus project – a state of the art Vocational Training Centre offering courses from bricklaying and carpentry to building services to performing arts. The £36m campus with world class facilities is mainly aimed at providing underprivileged youth with further education, apprenticeships and the skills and qualifications they would need to gain employment. A very worthy facet of education we found that to be!

We also laid the screed for the new extension for the Royal College of Radiologists, and we’re currently embarked on a whole new list of interesting projects and some innovative screed construction techniques as well. The latest in the group is the floors of West Acton School, where two of our teams are laying a new screed and steel composite system called Lewis Decking using dovetailed Lewis metal sheets and fast drying floor screed, FlexiDry.

We’ll keep you updated on all our interesting new projects. Do watch this space for more, and meanwhile don’t forget to visit our Screed Scientist website for informative screeding tips and techniques.